All in Music
Last night, I went to the Jaegermeister Tour at Roseland to see Lacuna Coil... I discovered them last year on last.fm and they've quickly become one of my favorite bands. They're a bit like Evanescence, with a powerful lead female singer in Christina Scabbia. Great show, but they were unfortunately followed up by Shadows Fall, which was just a bunch of noise. Total crap.
Anyway... I took a few videos of Lacuna Coil... here you go:
I'm a big Pink Floyd fan and on the right day, I'll happily reenact the whole Wall album for you, including marching around like a crowd full of hammers.
So today, I've got the first minute of The Trial for your amusement. Trust me, though, it doesn't have the same effect as when I do the visuals to go with it.
I guess its one of those things you have to amortize over a lifetime of just being able to say that I saw them, though... like when Sting dies 30 years from how or whenever... I can tell my kids that I saw the Police play live. I'll also be able to tell them that I saw the Stones, too, but that would be that big a deal b/c they'll still be touring then.
This song has been featured on a Gears of War commercial and it's hard not to stop and listen. I found the video for it on YouTube.
Hey, if anyone else uses Last.fm, please feel free to add me as a friend. I'm curious as to what everyone else is out there listening to.
Of course, I'm ceonyc on it.
Here's a problem:
I listen to my iPod on the way into work and at the gym.
I listen to Last.fm at work.
The iTunes that is connected to my iPod is the one at home, where all my music is.
Last.fm will not accept submissions earlier than the last submitted song.
So, what happens is that I listen at the gym, listen at work, but when I sync my iPod at home, none of my gym songs, which occurred before my work listening, get added to Last.fm.
But, I can't link the iPod to two computers and sync when I get into work and get my recently played data into the system before I start listening at work.
Very frustrating.
Any ideas?
Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 uses the example of the music industry to show why content needs to be controlled to be monetized and I just wanted to share something I learned a while ago.
"As for ceding control of your content, look at what happened to the music industry. Illegal file sharing crippled music sales, and the only saving grace has been the iTune platform, which functions by rigidly controlling distribution."
This actually isn’t true. I thought it was for a long time, being a college student when Napster was big, but I worked on a co-investment in the buyout of Warner Music and studied this hard. There were two much larger factors at play. First, you have a supply issue. Big box retail started killing off mom and pop record shops and music-only stores to a much greater degree than the web. Even the demographics that weren’t web savvy and into downloading music weren’t buying music anymore, because people shopped at Walmart and Best Buy and they hardly carried any of the catalogue that the music only stores did. More focus was put on DVDs and video games which were a much higher profit margin per inch of shelf space compared to CDs. So, if my dad wanted to go buy the Moody Blues first album, he simply wasn't going to find it... but he could find lots of copies of Madden Football or maybe even a DVD of a live concert.
Then, you have competition for finite entertainment dollars. Mobile revenues went up… $5-7 a month in text messaging and another $5-7 a month in ring tones… that’s a CD a month when you consider the limited budget of teens. Mobile revenues and gaming revenues skyrocketed during this time, not because music was free, but because they offered a much more compeling product. Eight songs for $16 simply wasn't going to cut it when, for ten bucks more, you could get a movie, and for the price of three CDs, you could get a video game to play with your friends for hundreds and hundreds of hours. Interaction. Socializing. Music, at that price, just didn't seem so interesting anymore. Napster didn't tank the industry... it just proved there was demand for the CD format to get broken up and for music to be obtained over the web. Apple is taking advantage of that, and they would take better advantage of it if they offered more pricing schemes and less DRM.
Personally, I don't know if Apple is ever going to relinquish their stranglehold on portable music. Their penchant for cool design and easy of use is difficult to match. However, if history tells us anything, hardware has always been a bad bet for maintaining margins and competitive advantages. The further up the stack you go, the higher the margins and more difficult it is to unseat you.
And in today's world, data is at the top of the stack, not software like iTunes. iTunes may have made it really easy to get people set up on the iPod, but its not what keeps them there. The critical mass of artists in the music store keeps them coming, but it seems to me that its only going to get easier to buy music from more sources in the future, not harder. There's nothing really that sticky about it, actually. No data, no network. I've been switching players a lot, actually.
So I thought to myself, why doesn't Apple buy last.fm and really ramp up the social network features? Scrobble everyone and provide social music functionality right there in iTunes. It would b like when AOL announced that they were building a social network on top of AIM. They already had all my friends and I didn't even have to do anything.
Imagine a MySpace competiter that already knows what music you listen to and on day one tells you who has similar tastes, on top of recommending who you should listen to. Plus, because iTunes is actually selling a ton of music, the company has the leaverage to actually get bands to start setting up camp on their last.fm artist pages. iTunes and the iPod spit out a ton of data that their software doesn't use effectively at all, and last.fm has a really neat application to make the most of that data. What if Apple made all of those little last.fm widgets their own little try and buy mini iTunes stores? I think they could get last.fm at a reasonable price relative to the kind of value they could add to it by integrating it with their hardware and software. Seems to me like a natural fit.
